Reading Passage 1
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1–13, which are based on the passage below.
The Silk Road
A The Silk Road was never a single road, nor was it paved with silk. It was, rather, a vast and shifting network of trading routes that linked China with Central Asia, India, Persia and, eventually, the Mediterranean world. For well over a thousand years, goods, people and ideas moved slowly along these routes, across some of the harshest terrain on Earth, in one of the most remarkable exchanges in human history.
B The trade is usually said to have begun in earnest during the Han dynasty of China, more than two thousand years ago. The Chinese sought strong horses from the peoples of Central Asia, and in return offered the one product that no one else at the time knew how to make: silk. Light, beautiful and easy to carry, silk was so highly prized in distant lands that in ancient Rome it was worth its weight in gold, and the secret of how it was produced was guarded in China for centuries.
C Silk was only the beginning. Westward went not just silk but porcelain, tea and spices; eastward came gold, glassware, wool and horses. Yet very few merchants travelled the whole enormous distance themselves. Instead, goods were passed from trader to trader, each carrying them a stage further and taking a share of the profit, so that a bolt of cloth might change hands dozens of times between China and Rome without a single person making the entire journey.
D Far more than goods travelled these roads. Along with the silk and spices went ideas, art, technologies and religions. Buddhism spread from India into China along these very routes, carried by merchants and monks, and later religions travelled the same way. Inventions such as paper made their slow journey westward, while musical instruments, styles of painting and words from many languages were exchanged wherever traders met. In this sense the Silk Road was one of the great highways of human culture.
E The journey was extraordinarily dangerous. Traders had to cross scorching deserts, such as the Taklamakan, and freezing mountain passes, always at risk from thirst, cold and bandits. To survive, they travelled in large groups called caravans, often using camels, which could carry heavy loads and endure long stretches without water. Scattered along the routes were oasis towns and specially built rest houses, known as caravanserais, where travellers and their animals could shelter, trade and recover before pressing on.
F Not everything that travelled the Silk Road was welcome. Disease moved along it as readily as silk, and some historians believe that the great outbreaks of plague that swept across Asia and Europe were carried, at least in part, along these trading routes. The very connections that spread ideas and wealth also spread sickness, a reminder that trade has always carried risks as well as rewards.
G By the later Middle Ages, the overland trade began to decline. As ships grew larger and more reliable, sea routes between Europe and Asia became cheaper and safer than the long and perilous journey by land, and gradually the caravans grew fewer. Political changes, too, made some of the old routes harder to travel. The Silk Road did not vanish overnight, but its great age was passing.
H The term ‘Silk Road’ itself is surprisingly modern; it was coined only in the nineteenth century by a German geographer, long after the trade had faded. Today the name has taken on a romantic glow, standing for adventure and the meeting of distant cultures. Historians still study these routes to understand how ideas and goods spread across the ancient world, and the story of the Silk Road remains a powerful symbol of how far human beings will travel to trade, and how much they carry with them when they do.